BanQ and the Châlons Library Companion sit on opposite ends of the same problem: how do you make institutional knowledge feel natural on a phone without turning a library into a toy?
Both shipped while I was at InMédia / BiblioMondo — BanQ in 2018, Châlons in 2019 — during the knowledge-platform years, not as later freelance side projects.
BanQ: mobile-first at national scale (2018)
A national library and archives portal carries catalogue depth, accessibility expectations, and stakeholder scrutiny. Mobile-first UX there is not about fewer features — it is about sequencing complexity so citizens can act without drowning.
Leading design into implementation meant the approved UI had to survive engineering reality: components, edge cases, and the multilingual surface area of a public institution.
Châlons: companion apps that earn their place (2019)
A library companion earns trust when loans, renewals, alerts, and barcode self-service feel faster than the desk — and when multilingual support does not break the layout. React Native helped us ship one experience across devices; the harder part was syncing with institutional backends without fragile happy paths.
Shared lessons
- Institutional UX is information design under constraint
- Stakeholders are part of the user system, not noise around it
- Testing use cases beats polishing screenshots
- Mobile is a deployment target and a product philosophy
Those projects still shape how I evaluate product work: if it cannot survive real patrons and real operators, it is not finished.